Post #1846764
2026-04-30 16:37 UTC
@jonmsterling apologies for the self-promote, but you might find this blog post I've written interesting: https://jakegines.in/blog/2025/why-nix
TL;DR: If you don't do any serious customization of your system, just use a mac and you will be okay. However, if your workflows are reliant on even somewhat complicated custom tooling, nix is absolutely unbeatable.
Separately, as the tools, systems, and workflows from PL/FM become more applicable to real-world systems, I believe nix's reproducibility story becomes extremely motivating. After all, why just have reproducible builds when we can have reproducible verification as well?
Replies (1)
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@jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz 2026-04-30 17:36
@JakeGinesin I don't want to use nix. I recently installed nix completely fresh in order to build a project that uses nix. It didn't work, the maintainer couldn't figure out what was going on. I yeeted it and built all dependencies from scratch. This is one of those cases where I'm sure it's a skill issue, or maybe the maintainer made a mistake, etc., but in the end, it doesn't matter. It sucks.